True Integrated Medicine
“Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that, it is its nature. Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself, it will do more than if you paralyze it by encumbering it with remedies.”
–Count Leo Tolstoy (Russian Writer and Philosopher, 1828-1910)
“The cure of the part should not be attempted without treatment of the whole.”
–Plato (Athenian Philosopher, 428-348 B.C.E.)
Have you ever woken up in the morning with a feeling that something’s not quite right, but you couldn’t quite put your finger on it? That is the feeling that we get if something is out of place. Our minds and our brains have evolved with a remarkable ability to pinpoint things in external space: it was once an important survival mechanism. As we became more complex, those same systems began to be able to tell when things were out of place in our internal environment as well as in our relationships. We are social animals and most of the cognitive systems of the brain are designed to aid and abet our social interactions.
The key to health is to have all of our systems working in harmony. It is absolutely true that 70% of human illness is a result behavior born of bad choices. We make those bad choices when we stop listening to our bodies and heeding our hearts.
People love to place us in categories. I am constantly being asked why all my work contains three parts: cutting edge conventional medicine, natural medicine and self-help. I’ve had people in the publishing business say, “Well, is it health OR self-help?” For me, the answer to that is yes!
We cannot attain health and wellness unless we have done some work on ourselves; we cannot heal ourselves and others unless we have something with which to do the healing. If we are fearful, and moving haphazardly through life with little self-control, it is hard to pay attention to your body, mind, relationships, subtle systems or spirituality. A physician too distracted to focus on and respect another person is unlikely to help him or her get better. A therapist without a strong sense of self would find it hard to help a troubled mind, and a spiritual teacher who had no personal experience of the Higher Realms of existence and no clear moral compass, could devastate the spiritual well being of a disciple.
When we talk about Integrated Medicine, people usually assume that we are only talking about integrating different types of treatment. Yet that is only part of it. We are also aiming to integrate the individual: to enable every aspect of the person to be acting in harmony. When all of our systems are in harmony, pulling together in the same direction, when they are listening to each other and communicating with each other, there is a free flow of energy and we achieve a state of coherence.
And it is this coherence that underlies our sense of health and well being.
For coherence is the key to resilience.
“The patient must combat the disease along with the physician.”
–Hippocrates (Greek Physician, c.460 B.C.E.- c.377 B.C.E.)
“Those whose consciousness is unified abandon all attachment to the results of action and attain supreme peace. But those whose desires are fragmented, who are selfishly attached to the results of their work, are bound in everything they do.”
–Bhagavad Gita
The Global Consciousness Project
The Global Consciousness Project (GCP) based at Princeton is one of the most significant experiments in consciousness that has ever been attempted.
Recent results released by the GCP indicate that the combined mental energy of millions of people may have some impact upon world events. After measuring the readouts from random number generators stationed all over the world for the past seven years, the group appears to have found spikes of decidedly non-random activity surrounding a number of major events like the 9/11 attacks and the Indian Ocean tsunami.
This is such an important topic that it’s only right and proper that everyone should have the chance to scrutinize the data, and that’s exactly what’s happening.
You can find an interesting summary here, together with some excellent comments on both the positive and the skeptic sides.
You will also find a discussion about the GCP and some related projects in Healing, Meaning and Purpose: the Magical Power of the Emerging Laws of Life. If the data is correct, and I am persuaded by most of it, the implications for all of us are just stunning.
Everything that you think and do causes ripples to spread out into the world, that have consequences for you, your family, friends and the world at large.
“There is no such thing as a vacuum. All things are connected in Spirit.”
–Emanuel Swedenborg (Swedish Scientist, Mystic and Philosopher, 1688-1772)
People Dangerous to Your Health
I found a terrific blog with the title “Warning: Bores and buffoons may endanger your health.”
Our ability to self-regulate is a limited resource that fluctuates markedly, depending on our prior use of willpower, tiredness, stress and our personal resilience.
A new study by a team lead by Professor Eli Finkel of Northwestern University has shown that poor social coordination impairs self-regulation. What does this mean? If you are forced to work or interact with difficult individuals you may be left mentally exhausted and far less able to do anything useful for a significant period of time. In other words, draining social dynamics, in which an individual is trying so hard to regulate his or her behavior, can impair success on subsequent unrelated tasks.
In the research, volunteers were asked to work in pairs to maneuver an icon around a computer maze, with one volunteer giving the instructions, the other moving the joystick. Those operating the joysticks were actors, primed to respond to instructions in slow, stupid, inefficient and generally irritating ways. What was interesting was that the effects were not mediated through participants’ conscious processes: they were almost entirely going on below the level of conscious awareness.
There is extensive literature on the consequences of social conflict. But until now, very little research has been conducted on the effects of ineffective social coordination. That has been a big gap in the research literature, particularly given the fact that most of the higher systems in our brains are dedicated to social functions, and since the earliest days of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, tasks requiring social coordination have been the norm. In our day-to-day activities we have to cooperate with other people. Ineffective social coordination consumes a great deal of mental resources and has high costs for subsequent self-regulation. This is so important, because self-regulation is essential to living life well. It is also essential to the existence of a well functioning society.
What to do with this new information?
Identify people who drain you. If you need to work with them, do it in short bursts, and give yourself plenty of time outs.
And continue to build your resilience.
There’s also one other piece, that we’ll look at another time. Some people may also drain your energy directly. You may have come across "energy" or "psychic vampires." They really do exist, though there is nothing supernatural about them, and they don’t have fangs or an aversion to garlic. In another post I’ll show you some techniques for dealing with those people as well.
The researchers have done us a great service by putting the entire paper on the departmental website. Access is free.
Taking the Measure of a Society
“You don’t have to be big to be great.” — Sholom Aleichem (a.k.a. Solomon Rabinowitz, a.k.a. “The Jewish Mark Twain,” Russian-born American Yiddish Writer, 1859-1916)
How do we really take the measure of a society? How do we decide whether it is compassionate and great? Is it just a subjective, culture-bound opinion? I have faced this question on many occasions when doing interviews and having meetings in which I am advocating for the mentally ill. I have seen are many different criteria for trying to evaluate a society and a country:
1. The way in which a society treats its youngest and oldest citizens;
2. How a society honors its dead;
3. What opportunities it offers to its citizens and for people who come to the country and join the society;
4. How it behaves toward other countries;
5. The leaders it chooses to follow.
All of those are correct. But I would like to suggest that we should expand on those.
For me: “The true measure of a society is how it treats its weakest members.”
For this is a measure of how far a society has progressed from a dog-eat-dog dominator model toward a more egalitarian partnership model. I have previously described my admiration for the work of Riane Eisler, and in my book and CD program Healing, Meaning and Purpose, I dedicate a whole chapter to ways of applying and expanding on some of her work.
I was once speaking to a Minister of Health in another country, and he expressed the view that providing care for the mentally ill was not the responsibility of government, and that they were simply a drag on the country’s economy. I politely but firmly disagreed, and was able to show him that providing good quality compassionate care for the mentally ill was not just the right thing to do, but it could also have a positive impact on his country’s bottom line. It happened that we were in a Buddhist country and he had a small image of the Buddha in his office, with some incense in front of the statue. At the end of my presentation I used a quotation attributed to the Buddha:
“In separateness lies the world’s great misery; in compassion lies the world’s true strength.”
When I talk about the advantages of an expanded, five dimensional model of thinking about people and their interactions, it is exceedingly practical. Many of the same things that are good for individuals are also good for society as a whole. That seems such an obvious statement, but when you think it through and apply my same principles of personal integration to integrate relationships and to produce an integrated society, the results can be remarkable.
“Compassion is the chief law of human existence.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky (Russian Writer, 1821-1881)
Technorati tags: Riane Eisler, compassion, Buddha, society
